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Linux-Based Gaming Handheld To Rely On Low Material Cost, Indie Apps
dartttt writes "Robert Pelloni and his team are working to develop an indie handheld gaming console, the 'nD,' which will run a number of indie games. The device will support 2D games only, and will run a custom-developed, embedded Linux firmware. It will have its own Game Store, which will allow users to download games. The SDK will be released soon, and is based on open source gaming standard SDL. Developers are being told that they can actually start making and compiling games on Windows, Mac and Linux using a 320x240 resolution."
Maybe this one won't eat batteries...
It consists of a 4 x 13 orthogonal matrix of 2d symbolic tokens. With these, one can play an almost limitless variety of games - even 3D ones! People are free to develop their own games. No batteries or source of electricity needed, it runs off of mechanical energy provided by the player(s). It can be produced for less than $1, with very low tech (no chip fab needed).
I call it "cards."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It's unfortunate that a library as bloated and weakly optimized as SDL is becoming a "standard". I started using it a few years back and then, after I was not happy with the performance, I looked at the source and noticed gems such as, under Windows the fact that SDL_SemWait() was always calling WaitForSingleObject() (which is every time a kernel call with huge switching overhead) and had no atomic read-write-modify fast-path. I'm reminded of a comment on gamedev.net by someone that "SDL killed my parents" and it struck a note of harmony with me despite the overdramatization. Look, if one is writing for games, one should be striving for efficiency. SDL is too big and tries to do everything; jack of all trades and master of none. For example, instead of using an SDL event queue, you should be using a lock-free, cache-optimized queue such as https://sourceforge.net/projects/mc-fastflow/ Similar points go for other areas of the framework. The best policy is to find the best libraries to use for each domain within your project. Here's a fantastic highly optimized math library for games, for example: http://www.cmldev.net/ For some areas, it may even make sense to roll your own, such as writing custom synchronization primitives which can beat what's provided by the OS/threading libraries: see http://locklessinc.com/articles/
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I've been working on a game for a while. It's had a Linux port since version 0.0.4. Sure, right now it's all command-line (not even ncurses), but I'm planning to add graphics in the release after the next one. It shouldn't be too hard to design the UI to work at 320x240, although I'll probably have to make it a different design than the PC one - 320x240 is a far cry from the 960x540 I'm currently designing for (960x540 will pixel-double to 1080p, the most common PC resolution, and will generally scale well to other resolutions).
This will probably turn out as well as Bob's Game.
Still, its good that it is here at last.
Read radical news here
The problem with pandora is it is too damn expensive. You can buy 2 netbooks for the price of the pandora ($500 US). If they can get the price lower I would gladly buy one.
We can only hope that this device or a different version of it gets a small GPIO connector for the connection of external sensors, devices, etc. With a $10 device with display and a 400 MHz cpu is really incredible in my opinion. After looking into Arduino, Beagleboard and similar inexpensive and relatively easy to program and use boards I am still looking for something that already comes in a case, is more powerful than an AVR and has a builtin display.
Almost all test and measurement devices that I currently use in our research laboratory have much less computing power which limits their capabilities and increase their price quite a bit. A couple of years ago developing embedded applications looked like black magic to me, fiddling around to save a few bytes, using a lot of tricks to get it done somehow but today you can easily throw a much more powerful processor at the problem and instead of tuning you can just program in whatever language you like and it will probably be fast enough.
If they can keep up to their announced sales price I will order a couple as nice presents another couple to take apart.
I think that the official "fixed that for you" for this one should read:
Linux-Based Gaming Handheld doomed to the dust bin, swap meets
sorry.
-- Sig under construction...
...anything Robert Pelloni says.... :)
"One day you will be able to hurt your smart phone's feelings." - Mahhshall
Even 2d acceleration of some sort? They harp on having a faster CPU than a DS, but that doesn't really matter that much for fast fun 2d gaming; pushing pixels is what matters.
The Pandora might be a few hundred bucks, but I think I'd rather have an open handheld computer than an open handheld gaming system.
Isn't $500 the premium upsell jump-the-line price? I thought they were $300-$330 when I ordered them (two years ago :-P) and hadn't gone up.
I guess when they say 16bit they mean the video color depth or something. Last I checked Linux won't run on a platform that is not at least 31-bit (yes I do mean 31)
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
to tell if it will actually be made. It looks like a concept at the moment. I'd want more detailed information about it's components before getting my hopes up.
Will it be possible to buy one of these without having to go online? A lot of kids' parents won't let the kids spend their allowance online; they have to spend it in a local brick-and-mortar store because only a local brick-and-mortar store takes cash.
Are we talking about streaming games? cartridges? cds? downloads?
I'll make a game or two if I can make a dollar or two.
... to take roms on the go
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
This sort of indie system will be made or broken by the ease of development and by the power of the development kit.
If SDL is hard to program for, then I might think twice. If they are going to go with SDL then they need to make it work with as many programming languages as possible. If I can program for this thing in Python, Perl, Ruby, Basic, C, C++, or whatever works for me, and it can connect to the development kit or SDL, then there will be plenty of games to choose from and it will be much easier for me and others to develop games for it.
However if they make it so it's only programmable in C, and the tools are hard to deal with, then forget about it.
Evolution doesn't necessary move forward!. In a time where 3D Dominates and Immersive virtual Worlds manifest ; we still see 16-bit 2D "SDL" LowRes Game Consoles Emerges! Or it's just the proof that Evolution is a continuum, and wherever there is a potential or Innovation isn't Fully Exploited, There would still be Evolution to happen. Or this maybe a message: "Don't mess with us Businessmen, Escaping Forward, will soon drag you backward" Or I'm just taking things too seriously!
vector graphics or SVG can't work?
If the device costs $50 because it has a strong graphics chip so be it.
It's all about volume, not portability (Smartphones are a bad example to compare to because the prices are artificially inflated to prop up the scummy cell business model).
Near as I figure it, they kitchen-sinked the engineering of the thing with all the wizz-bang features of 8 years ago, then took too long in getting it out, so now it's just a another portable game system that costs more than any two of its competitors. Combine that with the lack of big-title support, the ever-increasing smartphone saturation and, in some cases, memory of the nightmarishly bad hardware used in its spiritual predecessor (GP2X), and you end up with not a bang for the buck as a gaming machine.
Failing that, you can look at the handheld computer angle of it. Again, the price is too high, and for many of the same reasons: the pocket-sized IM, SSH client, email-checker, VLC remote, etc... All filled better by smartphones now. If Pandora could beat them on price, they might have something (although it would be a hard sell since that would still put it up against the iPod Touch), but clearly, they can't.
So their target market is pretty much shorn down to the geek who has the disposable income to afford one, the desire for a conversation piece/genital extension, and the lack of creativity to come up with anything better to do with that $500.
They don't have any other price, evidently. There's no more pre-ordering. If I had to wager a guess, I'd say they may be making to order at this point...
so I think the restrictions will be "no blatant warez, no illegal games, and no malware"
But what are "illegal games"? Would StepMania be an illegal game? (See Konami v. Roxor.) Would Quadrapassel be an illegal game? (See Tetris v. Biosocia.)
The GP2X had 2x200 MHz chips and the SNES emu on that was a disaster.
The Super NES has two CPUs that need to be kept in cycle-for-cycle sync all the time, or some games will fail. (Back then, synchronization was more primitive than modern mutexes.) Some games even used a third CPU on the cartridge. But in a native game, all the game logic can be compiled to native code or at least to JITable bytecode. Nor do native SDL games need to emulate the weird bit-planar tile format that Super NES games use. Answer me this: How many MHz did the original StarCraft need?
There is already a market for just as expensive and less powerful systems. Go into any WalMart, Target, or Toys R Us. You will find a dozen or so video game systems that cost between $15-$25. They will have one game hard coded in them, and people keep buying them. Why? Because they are disposable toys, and I doesn't take a huge amount of play for it to have been worth the price. The companies website is right. You CAN lose it and it would be OK. It is only a $10 toy after all.
Hopefully, they won't just stick to hand helds. Give us a unit that plugs into the TV also.
Unless this offers something my smartphone doesn't (incredible battery life, better games, etc) there's no way it is going to end up being carried around with me. Which means its not going to work as a mobile gaming platform.
I like the prospect of an open gaming platform as much as the next guy, but unless you get a decent market onboard it is going nowhere.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Seems like "bulk discount" is being thrown around to mask the fact that it actually does cost more than $20 to make a console like that.
The costs mentioned in the "commercial" are most likely bulk deals, i.e. for companies that can afford to order these parts in very large quantities. Even if Robert could order a large enough quantity to reach this cost, he'd need to find someone willing to assemble the consoles for cheap enough.
If it, in some freak occurrence, actually got released, it would most likely have a price point along the lines of $150 - $200 - at which point people realize that consoles like the Dingoo already allow homebrew development at a much lower cost ( $60 - $70 ).
Frameworks are a software design anti-pattern well-known at thedailywtf.com.
The problem with them is, that they are anti-modular. You have to use the whole framework, as using just a part drags in the rest anyway, and in the end, you end up using it as a platform.
At which point it becomes the inner platform anti-pattern, even better known at thedailywtf.com.
That is, when the abstraction is all but a limited shoddy copy of the platform below, offering no advantages. The best example of this ever, is Typo3 and TypoScript. A bad template language platform, implemented in a just as bad template language platform (PHP). FAIL. ^^
From my experience, I noticed, that nearly 100% of those things called "framework", are things that should be avoided.
Works for me.
I just go find a small library, with a proper interface instead, that becomes part of MY system, instead of the other way around.
May I suggest the Dingoo A320? It's cheap, it's powerful enough for 2D games, it can run Linux and it is actually available. Or if you want something more powerful but also more expensive, the Caanoo.
The nD looks nice on paper, but if you've followed the Pandora story you'll know it's far from easy to get a device produced, especially if you've never done such a thing before. Also the $10 price point does not sound very realistic to me.
Please note that this gentleman is probably not entirely sincere. He's been running a hoax about "Bob's Game" for years now. It's pretty entertaining stuff, intended as entertainment rather than deception, but it would be foolish to assume that he's got any plans to actually follow through on creating this handheld.
You must be joking. You honestly believe that the smartphone market would be more than a small fraction of what it is, and experiencing the growth that it is, if there was no carrier subsidizing and the full price of the phone was part of the initial outlay? Hell no.
The fact that you CAN get them full price without a provider (and Amazon is another bad example, since most of the time, they also offer it with a carrier contract and aforementioned subsidy) is irrelevant. What is relevant is how many of them ARE purchased that way, and I'd hazard to guess that outside of a small niche with a lot of slashdot overlap, relatively few of them are.
They may be competing in price with each other, but they're not remotely concerned with competing outside that arena (which is not to say they should be).
That said, it still holds to my point. Modern smartphones do everything the Pandora does, and usually better, for about the same price on the barrelhead, or less with a contract.
$10 for 400 mhz CPU and a 320 x 240 screen seems a little too cheap, but if so I want one. At $10 I could sell my game and the console at a profit.
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I'll give you the controls. Fullsize USB ports, though, are pretty much a non-feature outside of the same ubergeek group. The thing with the controls is that they're only half the story. The other half being what games are being controlled by them.
Even if their app store takes off, it's still going to be the same rinky-dink app-store style games you see on phones, plus emulators. And with such a small market base, I can't see many serious developers writing for it, so, at best, you can expect the usual ports and half-assed clones of popular IOS/Android games.
Granted, I don't see how anyone can play [S]NES on a touch screen (I've tried), but $500 is too steep for a [S]NES emulator. So you come up with a smartphone without the phone, and a game system without the games. Thus going back to my original point: it's over-engineered and crazy expensive, it's putting itself up against smartphones AND the big-name game consoles, and it doesn't dazzle on either front. It's not price-competitive, not power or feature competitive.
I'm not saying it's not a cool idea, or even that I wouldn't love having one to play with, but not at $500. I can't say how far above the "Sweet spot" (price/volume intersection) they are, but I can say for certain that the price alone cost them 1 sale. I'd not even be put off by a 3-month wait at a more sensible price.
If you want to see why Pandora isn't more popular take a look at the thing - it's UGLY. It looks like a knockoff of the Nintendo DS as reimagined by an 80s soviet design bureau. I think they would sell 2-3x as many of these things just by making it aesthetically pleasing. I think you get a lot more bang for your buck in a comparably priced smart phone. I realize the comparison is unfair due to economies of scale and other things, but if someone rooted an HTC Evo or similar device and ran Linux on it they could probably do far more with it than a Pandora. It has more memory, more storage, an HDMI out, USB, SD etc. It doesn't have a physical keyboard but small bluetooth keyboards & controllers do exist so you're not even depriving yourself of that.
Even if their app store takes off, it's still going to be the same rinky-dink app-store style games you see on phones, plus emulators. And with such a small market base, I can't see many serious developers writing for it, so, at best, you can expect the usual ports and half-assed clones of popular IOS/Android games.
The OpenPandora's stuff is mostly on http://repo.openpandora.org/ now. It seems to coordinate the other places.
Granted, I don't see how anyone can play [S]NES on a touch screen (I've tried), but $500 is too steep for a [S]NES emulator. So you come up with a smartphone without the phone, and a game system without the games. Thus going back to my original point: it's over-engineered and crazy expensive, it's putting itself up against smartphones AND the big-name game consoles, and it doesn't dazzle on either front. It's not price-competitive, not power or feature competitive.
I'm not saying it's not a cool idea, or even that I wouldn't love having one to play with, but not at $500. I can't say how far above the "Sweet spot" (price/volume intersection) they are, but I can say for certain that the price alone cost them 1 sale. I'd not even be put off by a 3-month wait at a more sensible price.
To be fair, there are issues with the Pandora, but it's still pretty damn cool.
There are a couple of interesting games that are somewhat Pandora specific (like Super Geometry Dust), but as usual it's mostly fantastic for emulators where you've got
SNES
Sega Megadrive (Americans call it the Sega Genesis)
MAME
ScummVM
Residual (Grim Fandango)
Which are all pretty much spot on
Then you have some more work in progress ones, like
Playstation (playable enough for FF7 but some annoying lag in places)
Amiga (ugly UI to select stuff)
N64 (playable for Mario 64, but it's not ideal)
And probably a couple of others that I've completely forgotten.
I'm hoping that the UI improves as well - something like meego would absolutely rock, and it should work quite well
Uhhh...this is the "Bob's Game" guy, the one whose vaporware game he has been spamming "viral marketing, whatever" for years with no actual game to speak of?
So considering the fact you can't even buy a screen from Digikey, a place that has those made in bulk, for $10 I kinda doubt this guy is gonna get a complete system for that price. Go look at Chinamart and you'll see the bunches cranking out low end emulator systems by the boatload only have the price down to around $45 for machines MUCH worse specs than this.
So yeah, until I see actual systems in actual hands I'm gonna have to call bullshit.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
960x540 QHD, eh? A lot of recently, and up-and-coming Android devices have that resolution, porting to them would require zero scaling, and porting to my current phone (HTC Desire HD), at 800x480, would only require minor downscaling.
Yet Another Linux Gaming Handheld
There's the Pandora, or you could just build a handheld running MeeGo. Those will run 3D games just fine using OpenGL-ES. Why does this guy feel the need to reinvent the wheel?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I mean the pandora is horribly, horribly expensive. 500 dollars just to have four knobs, a keyboard, and a machine that does nothing but play games ? ( no wonder they don't show the price on the homepage )
I'd rather have an Xperia Play. It's cheaper (not a lot, though), better games, it plays PSX and N64 ! Plays legacy games and emulators just fine, and it's also a phone, so you always have it on you. To idiots (say, your boss) it looks like a phone and thus can be brought anywhere without people getting their knickers in a twist.
It has cheap (or even free) emulators for everything including the old sierra games (discworld on android ! Hurray !), ... even dosbox !